Dark Void is an impressive title that simply falls short of greatness due to being so run of the mill. There's some truly distinct ideas thrown in here, but the overall outcome is one of familiarity and a disjointed sense of gaming perception. Perhaps with a little more imagination, a better, more engaging story, likeable characters and a little extra polish, the game could have been marvellous. As it stands, Dark Void enters shooter territory with the cross-hair firmly fixed to the forehead. It's an enjoyable game, albeit quite short, filled with great music, decent voice acting but a lack of flair both visually and in the gameplay. If you're a fan of shooters and have exhausted all other avenues, then Dark Void will probably keep you entertained for a few afternoons. If you're looking for the next big thing in gaming then sadly you won't find it here just yet. The ground work has been done, Dark Void has the potential to be just as kick ass as its more popular shooter peers.

Dark Void is a strong first effort. The combination of flight, ground, and vertical cover combat provides a fun and unique game that is not replicated by anything else out there today. If only the bugs and audio glitches were ironed out and the the narrative were as strong as the gameplay, Dark Void would be a great game. As it stands now, it still has some barriers to overcome.

If the thought of having two canisters of jet fuel strapped to your backside gets your adrenaline racing, then you'll probably have a pretty good time with Dark Void. It's certainly flawed, especially when it's trying to be a third-person shooter, but it also has lots of great ideas. It will surprise you sometimes, but mostly it'll leave you feeling like it could have been so much more. If we hadn't just finished a year that gave us the likes of Assassin's Creed 2, Uncharted 2, and Arkham Asylum, I could possibly let the few bright spots outshine the obvious lack of polish. But with groundbreaking games like those having set the bar so high for this genre, it's impossible not to draw comparisons, especially when you're continually teased by all the promise and potential trying to peek through.

Although, I was pleased with the effort Airtight Games put together, I can stop to sense they could have done more. The graphics quality and parts of the gameplay, like the tech-points, need to be varied up to make Dark Void stand amongst the thieves. Even so, Dark Void gets our recommendation even though it doesn't meet our expectations. This one not for everyone, but those who do not mind shooting into the air, will find Dark Void to be a refreshing sidestep from the norm.

Graphically Dark Void is a mixed bag: draw-distance, character models, the lighting, and massive environments look fantastic; while slow-down, tearing/overlap, and jittery screens are an unfortunate occurrence. I could tell that this game took a long time to make, because on the drawing board everything looked so great but once it was finished no one could figure out why it was so bad. Dark Void can be completed in less than seven hours (as long as you don’t break to many controllers in frustration) and even then I felt as though I had been playing the game too long. Even with all these negative things I have to give respect to Airtight Games for creating something so ambitious on their first next-gen outing (the air/vertical gameplay is better than the land fighting). I look forward to seeing what they do next and in the mean time I can faithfully recommend Dark Void for a quick weekend pick-me-up, as the game is not all bad, it’s just all average.

Dark Void’s single real achievement is the way it blends in-the-air and on-the-ground action without creating a horrible accident of compromise. While the game can be a lot of fun on a mechanical level, it’s not quite different enough to feel like a brand new experience, and there are enough minor-yet-noticeable problems that make it harder to appreciate the overall package. Like the hero Will, if you’re going to strap on this experimental jetpack, you’ll experience certain thrills, but you can’t expect things to go off without a hitch.

You can understand and appreciate what the goal was here, and had it have been pulled off, it would have been quiet the spectacle. Instead though, it’s fallen into a game that you will beat, then shelf, never to be looked at again. Probably the most fun experience in the game is the simple achievement unlocks which are scattered throughout the game and give a nice distraction from some of the more repetitive things the game has to offer. It’s certainly not a terrible game, there are some silver linings to the cloud, but for a game that is billed as ‘a epic adventure’ its unbelievably bland. If you own it, you’ve likely already finished it, if you don’t own it and must play it, probably best just to rent it.

It's a shame that Dark Void doesn't capitalize on it's high-flying potential as well as it could. And it's even more unfortunate that there's no way to face off with your friends in aerial combat or stunt competitions. Dark Void offers only a single-player campaign, and the story has enough intrigue to keep you mildly interested throughout. The adventure is reasonably long, and once it's over you can replay sections you enjoyed and continue to upgrade your arsenal. Even so, there isn't enough content to justify paying full price for the game. If you are hungry for some jetpack-fueled excitement and willing to spend a few hours to earn it, then Dark Void will reward your determination with some great opportunities. The thrills are in there, but you'll have to handle a lot of baggage if you want to find them.

While we appreciate the work Airtight has done in actually giving players a fully-fledged rocket pack to play around with, there's little else to entice them back for multiple playthroughs. Dark Void ends up a mediocre package despite housing such promising fiction—even if we wish the story of the Watchers, the Void, and even Will would have been fleshed out with more than texts found in-game. The idea of an alien race fostering and perpetuating humanity, only to be overthrown in revolt, is intriguing, but stopping their re-invasion of Earth only gets in the way of an awesome jet pack simulator.

What Airtight Games needed was more confidence: their pedigree with the flight sim genre would have probably been better served if they'd kept their game in the skies. Gears of War might be a popular game, but a sloppy imitation with tacked-on flight bits isn't going to win anybody over. Dark Void might want to soar, but it never finds a way to get its feet permanently off the ground.

As a complete experience, Dark Void has moments of intense action, broken up by abject foolishness. With its poorly thought-out narrative and game world, as well as an overall lack of polish (both artistically and technologically), there’s not a ton on which to recommend Dark Void. It might have otherwise slipped into obscurity if it wasn’t for the cool concept behind it. Ultimately, though, a failure of execution leaves us with a thoroughly mediocre game that should have been thoroughly awesome.

Some great ideas that aren’t really implemented as well as we had hoped for. The jetpack is the only thing that is intriguing about the game, but the lack of variety and repetition of certain tasks, means you have to struggle through so much mediocrity to get to it. A slow starter, with a few shining moments, but hardly what I call value for money considering after one relatively short playthrough, Dark Void will be on its way to another home.

The core elements in Dark Void are well-designed and fun to play, and it tells an interesting story while setting up a world that's developed enough to deserve a sequel. But with its technical problems and a lack of enemy variety, Dark Void starts to feel like the game is getting in the way of its own universe. It's worth seeing for its unique twists on third-person shooting, but you'll probably come away feeling like it could have been much more.

Again, it's not that Dark Void is a bad game -- the designers included some nifty gameplay elements and an engaging, Stargate-type setting -- it's just that it doesn't feel like it knows exactly what it's doing. The ideas weren't taken to their logical conclusions; the designers stuck their toes in the water, pulled them back, and decided they needed to gather a little more gumption before they could dive in. Maybe in Dark Void 2, in which a brash, headstrong pilot gets a hold of a jetpack created by an aging engineer and uses it to fight zombies, we'll see the full-fledged realization of this game's genuinely interesting designs. Until then, however, jetpack fans will have to settle for half-baked.

Dark Void is a great concept. It attempted many different things, and while none of them worked out successfully, the game is still a thousand times more interesting than the average Gears of War clone. That doesn’t remove any of the flaws or raise its status to a “must-buy.” But you should play it once, if only to experience its incredible potential – and the amazing game it almost was.

And once the brutally short campaign is over, Dark Void is over. Without a multiplayer mode (which, we reckon could have been quite good), Dark Void rests on its single-player. Unfortunately, it's not up to the standards set by the best, and there's no motivation to play through it twice. Dark Void isn't bad, or broken, or busted. It's just average, generic, and instantly forgettable.

The ultimate issue in front of Dark Void is the fact that it doesn't know whether it's a third-person shooter or an arcade flight game, and does a pretty mediocre attempt at both. An uninspired approach to the design of the game's stages and challenges ultimately leaves Dark Void dangling in the chasm of mediocre shooters. Capcom's western developed titles haven't enjoyed the best of success so far; a trait we hope doesn't continue with Blue Castle's attempt at Dead Rising 2.

In the end, Dark Void's final product didn't live up to the potential that it had going for it. It was a great concept with some cool moments, but those moments were far and few between the unfinished control scheme and other flaws that plagued the title. I hope the title does well though as this reviewer would love to see a sequel that gave a little more substance and felt a little more finished.

Dark Void is by no means a terrible game and it is almost a solid one, but between the twitchiness of the gameplay, some occasionally last-gen visuals and a lack of genuine excitement at some points, you may find it hard to persevere or even care. Those willing to put the time and endure the flat opening stages will be rewarded with increasingly exciting stages but if you keep low expectations you may be pleasantly surprised. An unfortunate miss-fire from what appears to be a genuinely bright and talented new developer.

If anything, the very beginning and the end are good illustrations of what is great and terrible about Dark Void. It begins with a fantastic introduction to flight, and ends with an all-out aerial dogfight followed by a suitably epic boss battle. But what do I actually remember more? The boring on-ground combat immediately following the prologue, and the terrible "you've been captured and have to fight out of a corridor-filled base without a jetpack" sequence right before the flight-filled endgame. It's just a damn shame that the nigh-amazing "The Rocketeer versus UFOs" premise crashes hard into "tepid Gears of Uncharted knock-off" ground.

All of the pieces are there for a successful game, and while there are flaws in the controls and visuals, none of the problems are really all that troubling. It's just that... the game isn't very fun, and the fault is based on the levels themselves, not the mechanics of play. With some changes, a sequel could easily improve upon the original without changing too much of the core game, like rebuilding a house out of the same materials. In a way, it's the opposite of Iron Man, with a strong core but no real focus. The only area where SEGA succeeded was in realizing that the game had to blend together the different elements, not keep them apart. Where Airtight failed was not realizing that very fact. In the end, it's worth playing Dark Void, though expectations should be kept very low, and it's not worth picking up at full price by any means.

Dark Void is a pile of disappointment. It seems the only apt way to describe it. The concept is brilliant but the execution, not so much. The things that Dark Void does right are too far apart to make it a good game. The rest of it is just generic, third person shooter crap that is in no way original or exciting. The name of the game is ironic really as the game is actually, in the sense of interest, a Dark Void of boredom.

Dark Void is a very disappointing game, the action is uninspiring, unchallenging and the presentation isn’t much better. There are certainly better games than this out there, but whatever you do avoid this one.

The sad truth is, there is not a lot to talk about with Dark Void. Besides flying around (which unfortunately is not as exciting or fun as one might hope) it is a pretty standard and dull third-person shooter. It doesn't do anything wrong, it just does not do anything special either. Once you are done with it, you will forget about it. And because this is a single-player only game, without much reason for a second play through, it really hurts in the "value for money" department.

You'd have thought that any game featuring a high velocity jetpack would be a guaranteed winner, but Dark Void somehow manages to ham-fist the execution completely, leaving a game that's only ever fun in parts, while the rest is simply not up to scratch. We had high hopes for Dark Void, but ultimately, the final product is a crippling disappointment with very little lasting appeal beyond its slender running time.

Though the vertical combat is unique at first, it quickly gets stale. Consequently, Dark Void fails to bring anything substantive to the shooter genre. The linear level design, constant glitches, and unsatisfying, repetitive battles make this a game you should simply pass on.

Dark Void is all over the place. The story’s never explained adequately, the combat’s pretty much always a chore, and flying isn’t nearly as fun as it should be. I don’t hate Dark Void, but I don’t care for it, either. This is one of those titles that just exists; I doubt few will remember it this time next year.

It's hard not to feel sorry for Dark Void. It feels like all it ever wanted to be was a popcorn B-movie blockbuster, and there are plenty of moments where you can see how it might have managed it. But they're all so disparate, so badly arranged, that its latent charm is completely lost.

With a poorly-received demo already forcing Capcom to halve its sales estimates for Dark Void, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone that the full package is every bit as disappointing as expected. By Capcom's normally impressive standards, this is by some margin its least impressive offering for a generation. To be blunt, Dark Void is a bland mass of half-baked ideas, generic combat and unengaging aerial action, with poor AI and a wearisome story. If disappointment is what you're after, look no further.

The lasting impression which Dark Void leaves is still one of disappointment, however. Had Airtight been a bit braver, more willing to deviate from the norm and run with some of its bolder ideas, then this could have been a great game. Instead, Dark Void's extremely short campaign - with no motivation for replay and no multiplayer options - is more like a portfolio of half-baked concepts hurriedly crammed into an uninspired package for ease of presentation, more show-reel than show-stopper.

When Dark Void is finally complete, and the last confusing cut scene has played, there is absolutely no reason to go back and experience this game again. What started on paper as a unique blend of different gameplay styles, setting, and story, has turned out to be the first big disappointment of 2010, thanks to poor execution by the developer, Airtight Games. With so many better titles out there to spend your money on, this one is best left sitting on the shelf until it makes its way to the bargain bin. Even then I don’t know that I can recommend it to anyone.

Dark Void’s soundtrack is a consistently amazing blend of techno-noir (ala Blade Runner), tribal beats, and orchestral arrangements. It’s the type of score that can instantly make anything epic. The fact that it holds my highest praise should also be greatly disconcerting. Dark Void’s jet-pack inspires some genuinely thrilling moments, but never for long. From glitches to repetitive dog-fights and long stretches sans jet-pack, there is always something to ruin your fun as you trudge toward a wholly disappointing boss-battle and an inconclusive, patchwork ending.

Dark Void may be the most aptly named game to ever be realeased - with a half-dozen good concepts sucked in, alas, never to be seen again. It ranks even lower than last year's Bionic Commando in Capcom's list of franchises that had promise but turned out to be no fun to play. A little more fluidity, polish and thought would have made a big difference for this game, as it stands though, Dark aVoid this one.

Overall, Dark Void was a definite disappointment, but at the same time it's completely playable. It's hindered by staying a little too close to standard third person shooters, adopting the same mundane cover mechanic that just about every game post-Gears of War has stuck with, even if they try to dress it up with "vertical cover". The jetpack mechanics are great when you actually get to use them, and provide some of the best segments in the game. The problem comes from them being dangled in the player's face like a treat or promise of better things to come, instead of being part of the standard gameplay from the onset. If I actually got to fly around and make use of the really solid control set-up for the flying segments a bit more, I'd probably be a little less bitter about this particular title. If the game spawns a sequel, hopefully some of my current issues are addressed, but I have a feeling it'll be a long time before we see an actual non 8-bit follow-up to this one.

Dark Void is not a good game. Dreary and annoying in equal parts, this is a game best left avoided. Better games have already been released this year, and it's not even February yet. Dark Void will be forgotten in two weeks, and you'd be better off having not played it before then.